Excerpt of "The Trinitarian Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar"

T h e T r i n i ta r i a n Theology of

H a n s U r s vo n Ba lt h a s a r

An Introduction

B ren da n McI n ern y

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

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Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www​.undpress​.nd​.edu All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-­­­in-­­­Publication Data <to come>

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Contents

List of Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

1

1 God Is Love: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theology of the Immanent Trinity

2 A Confluence of Diverse Tendencies: The Sources of Balthasar’s Immanent Trinitarian Theology

3 Unless You Become Like This Child: Deification as Trinitarian Adoption

4 A Blessed Wilderness: The Trinity and Divine Incomprehensibility

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15 45 85 125

Conclusion

157

Notes

175

Bibliography

209

Index

227

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Introduction

God’s truth is, indeed, great enough to allow an infinity of approaches and entryways.

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord

T h e C h a l l e n g e o f R e a d i n g B a lt h a s a r

Any interpretation of Balthasar’s theology must contend with the profoundly ambivalent reception of his thought in the church and academy, an ambivalence caused in part by the peculiarities of Balthasar’s work itself. Throughout his academic career, Balthasar avoided or resisted the normative forms of theological writing. He began his intellectual career with a dissertation on German literature and philosophy. After he entered the Jesuits, his early theological studies were profoundly unsatisfying for him. He found the then-­standard neo-­scholastic theology an affront to the real glory of divine revelation.1 Significantly, Balthasar never did theology according to neo-­scholastic form or method, and in many instances he worked with a clear disregard for its categories.

In the first stage of his theological work (1929–45), he found himself transmitting primarily the thought and work of others through translation in both literature and theology. From his exposure to Henri de 1

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2 The Trinitarian Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar

Lubac, Balthasar’s interest turned toward Greek patristic figures: Irenaeus, Clement, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, Evagrius, and Pseudo-­Dionysius.2 This interest in Greek patristics led to Balthasar’s first major theological monographs on Origen (1938), Gregory of Nyssa (1939), and Maximus the Confessor (1941). This association with de Lubac and his rejection of neo-­scholasticism placed Balthasar outside then-­normative Catholic theology.

His decision in 1940 to serve as a university chaplain in Basel, Switzerland, further isolated Balthasar and distinguished him from many of the other great midcentury Catholic theologians, such as Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger. Unlike his peers, Balthasar never had students under his direction. He never had “firsthand” scholarly interpreters of his work, who in turn could form further generations of scholars. As such, by and large there is no Balthasarian theological school because there is no Balthasarian theological pedigree, even as his popularity has waxed and waned in the past five decades.

The ecclesial-­academic isolation of Balthasar continued when he left the Society of Jesus in 1950, to help his close friend and mystic Adrienne von Speyr run the Community of St. John. As a result, Balthasar could find no bishop to incardinate him and was therefore “forbidden by canon law to celebrate mass publicly, to preach or hear confessions.”3 The promulgation of Pius XII’s Humani Generis and its condemnation of nouvelle theologie also occurred in 1950. For Pius XII, “new theology” was suspect because those associated with it “destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision.”4 The solution to this error was a renewed commitment to neo-­Thomism.5 Balthasar was now an ecclesial pariah in his native Switzerland and his theological association with nouvelle theologie, especially with de Lubac, put him under the suspicion of Rome.6 Despite being supported exclusively by von Speyr and her husband, Balthasar continued to challenge the status quo. In 1951, he published his book on Karl Barth, whose lectures in Basel he attended and whose friendship he made. As director of Johannes Verlag, the newly founded publishing house for the Community of St. John, Balthasar had an immediate outlet for an antiestablishment theological vision. Significantly, the first books published were Hans Küng’s own work on Barth, Justification, and Rahner’s Free Speech in the Church.7 In 1952, he published his

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Introduction 3

own clarion call for church reform, Razing the Bastions. He also published works on Thérèse of Lisieux and Elizabeth of the Trinity in those years.

Though he collaborated and supported church reform before the Second Vatican Council, Balthasar was not a participant in it. In contrast to Rahner, Congar, de Lubac, Ratzinger, and many of the other leading names in Catholic theology at the time, he had no demonstrable impact on one of the most theologically significant events of the past century.

Indeed, as a result of the preparation and work of the council, Balthasar’s most significant and unique contribution to theology to date, the first three volumes of The Glory of the Lord – and thus the start of his massive trilogy—fell on otherwise preoccupied ears.8 As Fergus Kerr argues, “The shock waves that [The Glory of the Lord] should have had in Roman Catho­ lic theology were overtaken by unanticipated events” surrounding the work of the council.9 Furthermore, by the time the council had ended, and other theologians were becoming aware of the importance of this work, his contributions therein were read in light of his 1966 polemical critique of Rahner, and “liberal” theology in general, The Moment of Christian Witness.

Thus, Balthasar was perceived “as the leading adversary of trends in post-­ conciliar Catholicism,” and perhaps even an enemy of the Second Vatican Council, despite the fact that in many respects the council’s vision of reform matched his own.10 As early as 1967, Balthasar argued that what he saw as “liberalism” in theology was actually obscuring “the greatness of [the council’s] program” of renewal.11 But quickly thereafter, Balthasar became for many a paragon of postconciliar theological conservatism.

For anglophone theologians, the tendency to read Balthasar as a whole through his postconciliar polemics was exacerbated by the fact that, as of 1968, the only works in English translation were his books on Thérèse and Elizabeth (1953 and 1956, respectively); Prayer (1961); Science, Religion and Christianity (1958); his work on Martin Buber (1961); A Theology of History (1963); two volumes of essays in theology (1964 and 1965); Man in History (1967); the collection of essays on the church (1967); Love Alone (1968); and The Moment of Christian Witness (1968).12 While these are not necessarily insignificant works, they do create a skewed picture of Balthasar and his theological impulses, one that depicts him first and foremost as a reactive polemicist and writer of “spirituality,” as well as, perhaps, not a worthy theologian in his own right. By the time his major works, such as his book on Barth (1971, abridged) and the first volume of

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4 The Trinitarian Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar

The Glory of the Lord (1982), were translated into English, Balthasar was perceived as little more than “a Barthian, a mystic, a papalist.”13 Even with access to Balthasar’s major works, the forms, style, and references of his writing serve to isolate him. As already indicated, Balthasar presented his theology in a wide variety of literary genres. He wrote in aphorisms, prose poetry, meditations, and polemical pieces; theological, historical, and literary studies of individual authors; essays and short monographs; and massive multivolume scholarly works. The variety of literary genres, many of which provide Balthasar’s positions at best indirectly, encourage a disjointed reading of his thought. Moreover, even when Balthasar was working out his own arguments, he rarely presented his positions in a linear manner. His preference was rather to address something cyclically, contemplating a single theme again and again on new, ever-­deeper planes. In the description of Lucy Gardner and David Moss, There can be little doubt that reading Balthasar’s work is to read an intensely “compacted thinking”, which is to say that part of the remarkable achievement of his great theological oeuvre is precisely the repeated rehearsal of fundamental theological (and metaphysical) commitments in ever new configurations which seek to illuminate the same mystery. Thus, if one were to speak of the “systematic impulse” in Balthasar’s work, we should recognize that this does not reside in any riveting of “parts” on to an empty frame, nor in any correlation of God to his creature, but rather in the “ever more deeply plumbed repetition” yielding a formidable density of the same mystery.14 In some instances, this cyclical movement is accomplished over many pages, in which Balthasar approaches the topic at hand through a reading of a profusion of earlier theological interpretations of the theme. One is thus left with nonlinear and indirect argumentation, which often relies on an extraordinary number of literary, philosophical, and theological references.

Perhaps most significant for the argument here, Balthasar tended to avoid writing in a more typical systematic manner. As already noted above, Balthasar eschewed the normative theological form in which he was educated. While he shared his rejection of neo-­scholasticism with many of his contemporaries, unlike many of his peers, Balthasar did not retain the

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Introduction 5

neo-­scholastic habit of doing theology according to distinct theological themes. At no point did Balthasar write an essay or book or “tractate” on standard doctrinal topics, such as Christology, the Eucharist, or the Trinity.

Even in his principal, most “systematic” work, his massive fifteen-­volume trilogy (sixteen including the Epilogue), Balthasar does not present his thought through discrete theological loci but rather presents divine revelation through the platonic transcendental attributes of being: the Beautiful, the Good, and the True. Positively, this gives Balthasar’s theology the feel of a “seamless garment,” in which no doctrine or position is isolated from any other. On the other hand, traditional theological topics are thus treated almost opportunistically as Balthasar encounters, or thinks of, them in the course of his writing. Even the overarching structure of doing theology from the vantage of the transcendentals does not result in consistent structures within and between his theological aesthetics, theo-­dramatics, and theologic. At least from first appearances, the trilogy would seem to be not a single work in three parts but three independent works, were it not for Balthasar’s clear indications that they constitute a whole. As we will see, the unity is supplied not by the literary structure but by theological content. Beyond the trilogy, the material becomes even more chaotic.

It is no wonder that the reception of Balthasar has been so varied. For some, Balthasar’s work is a paramount example of contemporary, orthodox thought, faithful to the long tradition of Christian theology yet creatively a response to new challenges. He has been described as a new father of the church.15 In his funeral homily for Balthasar, the future Pope Benedict XVI said that, through Pope John Paul II’s elevation of Balthasar to the cardinalate, “the Church itself, in its official responsibility, tells us that he is right in what he teaches of the Faith, that he points the way to the sources of living water.”16 Balthasar’s fierce polemics against Rahner and “liberal” theology in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, his appointment to the International Theological Commission in 1969, his cofounding of the journal Communio, and his defense of controversial positions held by Paul VI and John Paul II that were the prerogatives of the hierarchy have generally served to reinforce the impression of Balthasar’s stalwart “traditionalism,” in contrast to the theological innovation of his peers.

Despite the praise of Balthasar, less favorable readings of his thought exist. Though the terms of the critiques vary, Balthasar’s thought has long been suspect. Initially, these critiques resulted from the debate between

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6 The Trinitarian Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar

neo-­scholasticism and the new theology already mentioned. Even after the Second Vatican Council’s renewed embrace of theological diversity, however, specific elements of Balthasar’s thought came under scrutiny and have remained so. Beginning in the 1960s, and stretching through the work of Alyssa Pitstick today, particular criticism has been leveled against Balthasar’s theology of Christ’s descent into hell.17 Karl Rahner associated his use of kenosis with Gnosticism.18 The radical orthodox thinker John Milbank provided a litany of Balthasarian errors in his short work on de Lubac, The Suspended Middle. According to Milbank, Balthasar was a voluntarist, who disregarded the ontological difference between Creator and creature, eliminated divine simplicity, confused person and consciousness, and gave creation too much “independent ontological space.”19 Balthasar has been criticized with equal vehemence from other quarters. Feminist, liberationist, and political theologians have also noted dangerous tendencies in Balthasar’s theological anthropology and apparent disregard for the social, economic, and political demands of the Gospel. 20 Most recently, in Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction, Karen Kilby has articulated what might be an unidentified and unspoken intuition for many who are apprehensive of Balthasar’s work. According to Kilby, Balthasar’s limitations as a theologian do not stem primarily from any material position but rather from the fact that he “frequently seems to presume . . . a God’s eye view,” which sets him “above his materials—above tradition, above Scripture, above history,” and against his own desires to remain epistemologically humble.21 T h e T r i n i t y i n B a lt h a s a r ’ s Wo r k

Against this background of ambivalence, this book offers a critical account of Balthasar’s trinitarian theology. Despite the variety among the critical voices, many share a common concern that something is awry in Balthasar’s doctrine of God. Whether these critics attribute it to epistemological hubris (Kilby, Rahner), a deficient understanding of the God-­ creature relationship (Milbank, Beattie, Dalzell, Bauerschmidt), or a faulty interpretation of the work of the economic Trinity (Pitstick), they suggest the need to examine the content, sources, methods, and, most importantly, the rationale, of Balthasar’s trinitarian theology.

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Introduction 7

A brief overview of the appearances of the Trinity in Balthasar’s work suggests that coming to grips with this area of his thought provides a key insight into Balthasar’s thought as a whole. Though he never wrote a single treatise on it, the Trinity appears as a major theological topic in work as early as Balthasar’s on the Greek fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor in the 1930s and early 1940s. In his work on Gregory, Balthasar evinces a definite interest in both the nature of the personal difference of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as well as in the relationship between the Trinity and deification.22 Indeed, Balthasar’s articulation of these distinct but deeply related topics presents the germ of his later thought, in which he articulates how Gregory sees the necessity of God having an equally divine partner. As he writes, drawing on Gregory’s Contra Eunomius, “There cannot be loneliness in God. . . . ‘A glory without a radiance would be dark and blind, closed in on itself ’.”23 Moreover, it is precisely the distinction of the Father and his image, the Son, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, that enables the deification of men and women. By the Spirit, we are elevated “to the plane of the uncreated Image” (the Son) and become the co-­objects of the Father’s love.24 Other seeds of Balthasar’s developed trinitarian theology appear in his work on Maximus, originally published in 1941. There, one can find foreshadowing of Balthasar’s understanding of the relationship between the divine unity, threeness, negative theology, and revelation. Following Maximus, who himself was following Pseudo-­Dionysius, Balthasar places number under the negative edge of the analogy of being. He writes, “Anything one could say about [the Trinity] would be based on number and could never attain the absoluteness of the Divinity or its identity of essence and being. . . . In the end we can only say with Pseudo-­Dionysius, ‘He is neither trinity nor unity’.”25 However, the inapplicability of number, which is a category of created nature, nevertheless does not indicate a complete lack of knowledge of God’s inner life. We are not left merely speculating. Rather, “the Christian knows about God’s triune being from divine revelation; it is not simply revealed as a ‘fact’ to be believed, but it is revealed already in the ‘facts’ that the incarnate Christ is the revelation of his Father and that the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from both, is given to those who believe as the spirit who makes them holy and adopts them as children.”26 Balthasar also makes a detailed study of Maximus’s technical

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8 The Trinitarian Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar

vocabulary (hypostasis, ousia, etc.) that will in large part undergird his own later positions on both Christology and the Trinity.27 Despite the presence of these trinitarian seeds, this first stage of Balthasar’s work on patristic figures lacks several key elements of Balthasar’s thought. In particular, the themes of immanent trinitarian “distance” and kenosis, or self-­giving, are absent or rejected.28 In 1945, with the publication of the poetic Heart of the World, Balthasar provides the first small but clear glimpse of the emerging importance of “distance” in the Trinity.

Within the final chapter, in which Balthasar depicts the immersion of the creature in the “wilderness” of God’s love, Balthasar writes, “We step back into distance. Love is found only in distance, unity only in difference. God himself is unity of Spirit only in the distinction of Father and Son.”29 In 1951, in his book on Barth, Balthasar refers to “the intradivine distance between the Persons in the Trinity” as the foundation of the distance between Creator and creature, and therefore the foundation of the analogy of being and the whole of the God-­world relationship.30 In the same text, one can find references to the I-­Thou relationships between Father, Son, and Spirit, the divine and human obedience of Christ to the Father, inner-­trinitarian prayer and conversation, the immanent Trinity and the analogy of being, and the manner in which the creature comes to share in this life by grace.31 Balthasar’s works on Thérèse of Lisieux and Elizabeth of the Trinity also include important commentary on the Trinity and an indication of the trajectory of his own thought. In the case of Thérèse, the importance of the Trinity comes through Balthasar’s negative evaluations of Thérèse’s “subjective theology.” As he argues, Thérèse at times narrows the Gospel and the Christian mystery by her focus on experiential theology, in which doctrinal themes have importance for her only if they can be “lived.” This focus on lived doctrine explains, according to Balthasar, Thérèse’s almost complete silence about the immanent life of God.32 Even though she speaks frequently about being a child of the Father, she fails to clearly ground this in the eternal begetting of the Son from the Father.

As Balthasar then argues, this lacuna in Thérèse’s work is compensated for by the complementarity of Elizabeth’s “objective,” mystical theology.

Published in 1952, Balthasar’s work on Elizabeth revolves around what he sees as the central idea of her theology, and what will become a central tenet of his own: our predestination in the Son to be children of

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Introduction 9

the Father.33 As Balthasar makes clear, such adoption in the Son is not a vague or metaphorical adoption, but a real participation in the eternal processions of the Trinity itself.34 These references to the immanent Trinity and what I term trinitarian deification in his early work are not peripheral to Balthasar’s theological vision, indicating nothing but idyll speculation on a matter of little real concern. Rather, they indicate what occupies a central, or foundational, topic in his theology as a whole. As he indicated in the foreword of a book

by Adrienne von Speyr in 1951, he held that the doctrine and theology of the Trinity are the foundation of all Christian thought and practice: the fundamental “perspective” grounding all Christological, ecclesiological, and anthropological perspectives.35 However, despite holding this conviction that the Trinity ought to ground all other perspectives, Balthasar later laments the lack of creative reflection on the theology of the Trinity in his 1952 Razing the Bastions. He asks, What place does the doctrine about the triune God have in Christian existence? And what place does it have in theology, in which the doctrine seems to have stood still, half-­congealed and dried up after Augustine’s psychological speculation?

There would be so many other paths besides that of Augustine, perhaps ever better paths (for ultimately, the solitary structure of the soul cannot supply the supreme image for the living exchange of love in the eternal God). Why does no one seek these paths and follow them out? Christian proclamation in the school, from the pulpit, and in the lecture halls of the universities could be so much more alive, if all the theological tractates were given a completely trinitarian form!36 Though, as noted above, he himself refrained from writing in the form of theological tractates, this passage from this “programmatic little book” articulates the direction Balthasar’s own thought would take.37 By 1955, with the publication of Prayer, the components of that more mature trinitarian vision began to take form. Here, one finds those elements of trinitarian thought for which he has become especially well-­known: kenosis, self-­giving, dialogue, and prayer.

Six years later, Balthasar published the first volume of The Glory of the Lord, the beginning of his magnum opus: the multivolume trilogy made

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10 The Trinitarian Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar

up of The Glory of the Lord, Theo-­Drama, and Theo-­Logic. All the elements of his trinitarian theology mentioned above appear throughout this work, though they are more fully developed: the stress on the difference—even “distance”—of the Persons; the presence of I-­Thou relationships between them, including dialogue, joy, and adoration; inner-­trinitarian kenosis, self-­sacrifice, and self-­giving; the basis of creation in the begetting of the Son from the Father; and our eschatological goal, realized already in this life, to participate in the Son’s relationship to the Father in the Holy Spirit. The Trinity is, however, more than just one theme among others in the trilogy. Indeed, as Balthasar claims in the general introduction to the first volume of Theo-­Logic, the focus of the trilogy as a whole is the Trinity.38 The trilogy is neither a progressive argument, with each part building on the last, nor a rough appropriation of the trinitarian persons to a divine attribute, as Rahner thought.39 Rather, each part of the trilogy approaches the one mystery of the Trinity in its self-­manifestation (aesthetics), self-­giving (dramatics), and self-­uttering (logic) in created being for the sake of the creature’s salvation and incorporation into the life of God. Creaturely being, assumed by God in Christ, serves as a kind of prism of the triune God, refracting the white divine light into the distinct colors of the “spectrum” of creation: the Beautiful, the Good, and the True. The Trinity, and its appearance and saving work in Christ and Spirit, gives the sprawling trilogy its deep unity.

His work on the trilogy continued almost to the end of his life, but Balthasar did publish works, often collections of essays, outside the trilogy. Despite its uneven tone—ranging from polemical and sarcastic to beautiful meditations—the Trinity appears again and again. Fittingly, one of the final texts he produced, Unless You Become Like This Child, presents in brief this beating heart of his theology, which he held in some form virtually throughout his career: the manner in which we come to share in the Son’s relationship with the Father in the Holy Spirit.40 “God the Father empowers his Son to have us begotten or born together with him from God.”41 Moreover, “to be a Child of the Father . . . holds primacy over the whole drama of salvation.”42 Surprisingly, for a theologian who so habitually disregarded established theological forms and structures, and who so regularly engaged in self-­indulgent projects on such disparate topics, there is extraordinary consistency in Balthasar’s trinitarian theology. While there is development,

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